rear glass hinge

[Kidd7]

the bolts on the hinges for the rear glass pulled out. the hinges are made of soft metal and the treads have worn out. I currently have no glass in the tailgate. Need some advice. Worst case plastic. The other thought is to drill the hole through and bolt it up till I can find some replacement hinges.

 

[toypaseo]

I might have a set of used hinges in my stockpile somewhere if you get desperate...

 

[Kidd7]

I tried drilling through to no avail. So I JB welded the studs back in and mounted the glass. Found a set on eBay.
This will get me through till a new set arrives.

 

[crunchie_frog]

Junk yard is best bet, ebay may have some but no way to verify the conditions of the threads before you buy them.

 

[Kidd7]

Thanks for the input. That's what I figured, but hoped somebody knew something I missed.
The hinges felt pretty solid this morning with the JB weld, but we won't be opening the glass until I replace those hinges.

 

[MrQ]

Buy a few if you get them off ebay. They aren't great quality and one of them stripped on me when replacing them on my parent's Explorer. On mine I bypassed the threads all together, drilled through hinge and bolted them to the body. Haven't had a problem since, and those hinges have been bounced around pretty hard.

Ford made a poor design choice using soft aluminum with only a few threads in it to hold that glass. All about saving money I suppose.

 

[Kidd7]

Thought about doing that, couldn't get through the aluminum easily with my drill & bits. Can you share a picture?

 

[koda2000]

I had one of the lift-gate rear glass hinges break (stud pulled it). This failure is pretty common. The hinge metal is soft and the stud socket is shallow. This happened on my '00 XLT, which was our "spare vehicle" and I just wanted to do a temporary fix until I got a replacement hinge. I removed the hinge from the glass and drilled a hole straight through the hinge where the stud had been and I replaced it with a bolt and nut. Somebody here sent me a used hinge, but I ended up selling the truck without ever installing it. The bolt didn't look pretty, but it worked fine for the remainder of the time I owed the truck. I left the replacement hinge in the glove box in case the new owner wanted to install it.

 

[Kidd7]

Got a set off eBay and one of those broke pretty quickly. So I drilled a hole and put a bolt through it, works like a charm.